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Politicians Should Just Stream It

Ok, I'm back from the All Things Political conference and it was very interesting. The panel I was on discussed best practices in online political advertising and on the panel with me was Ben Katz from completecampaigns.com (a website in a box solution) and a woman from a Washington based buying group who pinch hit for a missing panel member (since I don’t remember her name I’ll call her MediaWoman).

Our moderator Chris Jennewein from SignonSanDiego.com did an excellent job of asking questions that were really centered around advertising and not just email and website; as I’ve written before, online campaigns are a lot more than just websites, blogs, and emails. So, almost all of his questions were in my sweet spot and I’m happy to report I was the star of the panel and if not the star from the first day of the conference. The only real competition came from political consultant Dan Schnur but that’s for another post!!!

At one point the conversation turned to the benefits of running TV ads versus online banner ads. MediaWoman talked about buying impressions, measuring clicks and why you get a better bang for your buck with TV where you know what is going to happen. That’s when I jumped in with my Just Stream It strategy.

JUST STREAM IT

Do you really know how many people actually watched your offline commercial? The answer is ABSOLUTELY no. Sure you have models and tracking tools but those just really estimate it; even if you got some TiVo data all you know is whether they pounded through them or not. Big deal. You rely on outdated forecasting models that say if you run this many GRPs in a market (someone said 3000 per week per market) you can expect this movement in the polls. Really now? How do you know they saw the ad? Why don’t you just stream them online.

Streaming them online via a company like PointRoll gives you many more options and tracking capabilities. For example, take this ad we did for Dick DeVos for Governor of Michigan and you can see what I’m talking about. We know how many times the ad is being served, how many clicks, what the amount of time spent in the ad unit interacting with the campaign, the post click tracking actions, and most importantly how many times the video was streamed. Can you get that kind of data from your TV ad buy? The answer is no.

That’s why political campaigns as November 7th approaches should just stream their offline commercials in a banner unit. The incremental costs are marginal and guess what you might even reach an audience that wants to view your TV ads wrapped around by a great unit that stresses call to actions like volunteering, voting, reading about records, and etc turning the content over to the viewer. If you bundle that ad unit with a smart media buy now you might actually influence real people.

Comments

Eric:

I attended the conference...great stuff. I consult for a mix of clients - political and corporate. One of my clients is a PAC that specializes in Illinois judicial elections. In down-ballot races like these, where money is scarce, how should we look at dividing up resources? For one of the candidates, we've built our site, have a good email list (we average around 5,000 visitors a week to the site) ... streaming an ad online means paying for production of an ad that we may not use on television due to resources....it's a Catch-22. Given our limited resources, I'd love to do as much as I can on the Web to be cost-effective...but at what level does it take away from the traditiona, tried and true like mail and phones?

At the conference, many people said it takes 3 direct mail pieces to have an effect....but what if we only have resources for one mailer....and maybe some phones? Should we scrapt those efforts and move to something totally online?

Streaming an ad becomes cost effective as long as you already have the commercial built. If not, there may be ways to save on the production if you are going to stream it in a small frame (need less resolution).

If I had to only spend $1 in an online campaign, I'd buy it on search. You can geotarget in Google and with some fancy keywords you can make Yahoo act like it is geotargeted. Open up an adwords campaign and buy some keywords to start.

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